Again, OSCON 2010 was a great and fun show. We were lucky to be invited to present our project at Community booth 122. During the two days of the expo, we had the opportunity to explore a lot of possible use cases, and gained valuable insight into what people are using BlackRay for and where future uses are most probable.
At this point, we are making good progress on the 0.11 release. Mike has completed a full refactoring of the Index Functions (Issue 75) and is currently under way to redo the SQL using Lemon and Quex (Issue 77). This is very exciting and makes it a lot easier to actually use BlackRay for common database tasks that require more SQL compliance than the 0.10 release could offer.
Additionally we have identified two major features that must either make it into 0.11 or 0.12, either one of which would also make a GA release candidate once we support this.
Online Updates
BlackRay would be able to replace traditional disk-based databases in many cases when a true online update is implemented. This feature is complex and will take time, but it needs to be evaluated soon.
SQL Aggregate Functions
In order to make BlackRay a suitable choice for analytical workloads, we need Aggregate functions as well as the GROUP BY clause in our SQL. This feature is significantly less complex to implement, and would make BlackRay a prime choice in many data warehouse and statistical setups.
